Strategies in new drug discovery often look to natural products for leads in finding new chemical compounds with therapeutic properties. One of the recurring problems in drug discovery is the availability of organic compounds derived from natural sources. Techniques employing combinatorial chemistry attempt to overcome this problem by allowing the high throughput synthesis and testing of hundreds or thousands of related synthetic compounds, called a chemical library. In designing the synthesis of a prospective therapeutic compound or a chemical library, one often looks to natural chemical motifs which are known to have broad biological activity. Benzo[b]furan derivatives are of particular interest due to their frequent occurrence in nature and range of biological activities. Benzo[b]furan is named and numbered according to the Ring Index, American Chemical Society, as follows 
A number of signal transduction pathways are regulated by the binding of a symetrical bivalent ligand which mediates an inducible protein-protein interaction. Chemical inducers of dimerization, or “dimerizers,” are a promising new class of compound with a variety of experimental and, potentially, therapeutic applications. Chemically induced dimerization can be used, for example, to activate intracellular signal transduction pathways or to control the activity of a bipartite transcription factor. In some cases the homodimerization of a receptor is sufficient to cause a cellular response. Thus, dimeric small molecules are designed to promote protein-protein interaction. J. F. Amara et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 1997, 94, 10618; C. T. Rollins, et al., PNAS 2000, 97, 7096; V. M. Rivera, Methods 1998, 421; and H. E. Blackwell, et al., Org. Letts. 2001, 3, 1185.